Doc Pop’s News Drop: WCEU 2019 and Plugin Madness

Doc Pop’s WordPress News Drop is a weekly report on the most pressing WordPress news. When the news drops, I will pick it up and deliver it right to you.

In this week’s episode we talk about Think Like A Hacker, the new podcast from Wordfence.com and the newest results from our Plugin Madness competition. We also a feature a new video that the WordCamp Europe team shared with us about this year’s event in Berlin.

Love WordPress news but hate reading? My name is Doc and this is Doc Pop’s News Drop.

This week we have a big update from the global lead for WordCamp Europe and we’ll also share updates about our Plugin Madness competition, but first…

We are huge fans of the folks over at WordFence, who continously pump out great research and articles about WordPress security on their blog. They’ve recently launched a brand new podcast and video series called Think Like a Hacker.

This week’s episode of the show features a fascinating story about a vulnerability in the Social Warfare plugin and an activist who used this exploit to wage a war on the moderators of the WordPress support forums. This individual claims that when exploits are discovered, they should immediately be published on the support forums, and until that happens, they will be publically sharing those vulnerabilities on their own site along with examples on how to take advantage of them… starting with a vulnerability found in the Social Warfare plugin. It’s a fascinating story and one you can learn more about on WordFence.com/blog or by searching for Think Like a Hacker on your favorite podcasting service.

Mine is Overcast.

We kicked off our Plugin Madness competition with 64 WordPress plugins and we are down to just 16! One of this week’s closest matchups is Defender versus Advanced Custom Fields which is nearly a 50/50 contest at this moment. Defender is a WordPress security plugin by WPMU Dev that allows you to add a layer of denfense to your site. It’s against Advanced Custom Fields, which was the winner of the first ever Plugin Madness competition back in 2016. In fact, if you were one of the many readers who helped nominate WordPress plugins for this event, then you saw ACF in action.

Another match to watch is Smush Image Compression, a great tool for easily reducing image file sizes, vs Ninja Forms, another popular form creation plugin with over a million active installs.

WordCamp Europe is coming up in just a few months. The location of WCEU hops around each year and we are looking forward to this year’s event in Berlin. In preperation, the organizers of WCEU have offered to share updates with us each week before WCEU 2019!

Thanks for that update Milan, and thanks to all of y’all for watching. We’ll see you next week for more WordPress news and Plugin Madness.